


Pieces, Parts

by quigonejinn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A universe where Steve Rogers never gets the serum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pieces, Parts

**Author's Note:**

> "Chooses not to warn" is checked above for REASONS. Like. Seriously. This is not a nice fic. Bad things happen. Things that you probably think are out-of-character happen. 
> 
> If you need your AU's to stick close to canon events, this is not the fic for you.

At 7:35, you get up, go over, and turn the wheel three-hundred and sixty degrees. An hour later, you get up and do it again. Two hours after that, you brush your teeth at the sink inside the room and spend the night on the couch, eventually nodding off under a pile of reports from the cultural attache in Albania. When your alarm wakes you, you look at the time. You look at the light coming through the windows. Visually, you check at the door on the safe, still barred from the outside, and you carefully lift the files off you and set them down on the floor, trying not to drop any of the inserts. 

You get a broom. You sweep off the floor in front of the safe, then put the broom away and turn the wheel in the other direction a full eighteen times. You wait a few moments, and then, you lift the bar. You unlock the door. You open the door, and she falls forward, so that she lies in a heap on the floor at your feet for a while. Her shoulders heave; her whole body shakes, and you wait. You give her a chance to adjust, to ask if there is something she wants. 

"Would you like something to drink?" you ask, after a full minute of silence. 

"Tea, please," she says, voice hoarse. She is on both knees, and her forehead touches the linoleum of the floor. She doesn't trust her muscles to support her weight yet, but as far as you can tell, she is fine. She has her voice back; she'll tell you if anything is wrong, so you put a blanket from the filing cabinet over her. Otherwise, she'll get cold while her body readjusts. On the hot plate you keep in your office, you make a pot of tea. You cut up a lemon. 

A long time ago, Steve Rogers, a man told you that he could offer you a chance. 

...

A long time ago, Steve Rogers, in a medical examining room in Queens, a man told you that he could give you a chance. It was only a chance. 

In this universe, the chance didn't work out. In many universes, it doesn't: Colonel Phillips is a hard man to convince, and the hill for Doctor Erskine to climb is significant. Even if you get the flagpole down, even if you impress Carter, even if you throw yourself on the grenade, it doesn't always mean that you'll get the serum. In fact, in this universe, you weren't even the back-up or the back-up to the back-up: in the years afterwards, you wonder what would have happened if you'd been there, either in the wings or up in the observation booth. Could you have saved Erskine? 

Now that you're older, you can admit to yourself _probably not_.

You didn't make the _chance_ , but because you impressed Agent Carter with your brains and Colonel Phillips with your bravery, you became an intelligence agent for the Strategic Science Reserve. The war ended; you stayed with a successor entity. You used to run a handful of the their best. 

Now, you only run Natasha. 

...

After another ten or eleven minutes, after the water has boiled and the teapot warmed and filled, but before the steep is done, Natasha gets back onto her feet She wraps herself in the blanket, and sits down in her chair at the little round table in the corner, and you bring the tray over to her: teapot, two teacups, two saucers. Honey in a little jar with a plate of lemon wedges for her. Sugar cubes in a dish for you. 

The morning light picks out the dark red in her hair, and Natasha is still naked under her blanket. She knows that clean clothes for her are folded and sitting on the shelf behind your right shoulder; if she wants you to bring them to her, she can ask you to do that. If she wants you to turn your back or leave the room while she changed, you will would that, and if she wanted a bath or shower to wash off after eighteen hours of being locked in a steel box that measures two feet wide and three feet deep with a ceiling that can be winched down on her, a fraction of an inch at a time, she can have that, too. You could have the box moved to a room with a built-in shower and bathtub, and if she wanted it, you would even have a hot bath waiting for her when she came out. 

She wouldn't even have to ask: if she gave any sign of wanting it, you would do it without asking. 

Instead, Natasha wants to raise herself up from the floor and wrap herself in an old, somewhat scratchy wool blanket. She wants to sit across from you at a round table and wait first while the tea steeps, then for it to cool so that she can cool it by holding it with her right hand while keeping the blanket on her with her left. Usually, she cries while inside the box, and you usually sweep the floor before opening the door again: that way, when she comes out, trembling uncontrollably, face damp, she doesn't get dirt or dust stuck to her face. 

On nights when she is locked the box, you sleep at the office. In the beginning, you used to sleep on the floor next to the box, but when she found out, she told you to stop being stupid. _Use the couch, Steve. If there's a fire, you can walk the ten feet and let me out._

You remember when Natasha came over: blue skies, clear Swiss air. Mountains in the background. The way she nodded and said, _Steve Rogers._

You took your hat off. _Black Widow_. 

...

A long time ago, Steve Rogers, in a medical examining room in the Bronx, a man told you that he could give you a chance. It was only a chance, and in the end, you weren't selected. Instead, another man in training camp got the serum, and as far as you know, nobody has ever been able to duplicate the super soldier formula: a scientist who came over to the US after the war, an ex-HYDRA agent who claimed to have had success, but he was never able to duplicate it. He talked of having done it, but couldn't produce the goods. Your position then, and your position for years, was that he exaggerated to make sure he landed well. 

Eventually, Soviets developed a version that worked on women. 

Your primary abilities as an intelligence agent have never been physical. 

...

In this universe, Steve Rogers, you never got the serum. 

Without the serum, you never go on a rescue mission for the 107th behind enemy lines: you are never on a USO tour in Northern Italy in the early summer of 1944, and you are never in a position to step away for behind-the-lines rescue operation. Consequently, you never rescue James Buchanan Barnes, and --

...

Natasha defects thirty-eight years ahead of schedule on a bright spring day in Switzerland. Pine trees. Green pastures. Mountains in the background. She is a realist and knows that in 1956, all the world is divided into two parts. Consequently, she dresses herself in black. She drives out to a farmhouse on a remote mountain slope, and you arrive with a hundred men, thinking you've tracked the Black Widow to her den and find her sitting quietly on the front step, dressed in black, ready to -- to _cooperate_. 

Because Natasha defects thirty-eight years ahead of schedule, she comes aboard before Charles Xavier. Before Emma Frost or Jean Grey: the reasons that she gives for wanting to defect are clear and straightforward. She doesn't mind her work, but she doesn't want to work for the Soviets anymore. There is nothing to tie her there; they are beginning to develop technology that erases memories and rewrites personalities. They have done it to her a few times, and she doesn't trust them with it. 

But -- 

...

It's been a long time since you got the beaten behind a movie theater for telling someone to show a little respect. That was 1943, and you were twenty-five. You were roughly as tall then as you would ever be. These days, you're still small. Still slightly built, with gray in your hair. Glasses. Narrow shoulders underneath a trench coat. 

...

Why does Natasha go into the box?

Punishment.

What does the punishment accomplish?

Conditioning. 

Who built the box? 

You did, relying on specifications provided by Natasha, with assistance from the shop department. Four months into Natasha being cleared for field work, you and Natasha drive out to the surplus equipment warehouse on a cool, gray spring day. Ordinary office supplies, nothing scientific. Rows and rows of filing cabinets and old desks and stacked-up chairs. An old, sleepy watchman out front who had eyes more for Natasha than for checking your credentials to make sure that you were, in fact, authorized to order something from here: it was a sign of trust that the agency would let her off base with only you for a guard, but they figured, you think, that if she didn't break your neck in Santiago, she wasn't going to do it now. If she wanted to run now, they wouldn't spend too much energy trying to -- 

"I think this one will work," Natasha says and touches the top of something that comes up to a little above hip height on you. 

"Why not one of the footlockers up front?" They were significantly bigger. "Less -- "

"Thick walls," she says, quietly and knocks her knuckles against the top. You can hear a hollow noise that seems like it's from a distance. "I'll try to get out." 

You blink, slowly, and say nothing: eventually, Natasha looks up from studying the safe, and her expression is -- you don't know how to read it. It would be amused on another woman, but her eyes are steady and deep and green, and she is suggesting that when she disobeys orders, you should punish her in the visceral, corporal way used by trainers in the Red Room: strip her naked and put her in a box that starts out as being too small to be comfortable to begin with. Bring the ceiling down on her a fraction of an inch at a time. Keep her there. Cut off her air for more effect, and she can see the -- struggle on your face. 

She says, "You want me to run missions clean?"

Your reply is steady. "I want you to stop killing people when you don't have to." 

"You want me to run missions clean," she says. "I'm showing you how to teach me." 

She tells you how and where to put the air holes; she gives the shop department a schematic for how to build the ceiling, so that you can turn a wheel outside and fold her into a smaller and smaller space and keep her there. She makes a joke about how her trainers at the Red Room did worse for spelling mistakes on mission reports, but you've spent months debriefing her and four months running her as an agent: you can see the hint of fear in her eyes when the agency workshop delivers the safe to your office, after they've put into place against the wall. You and Natasha are the same height; you drew the line at building in shutters so that you could cut off her air supply if you wanted to, and the next three missions after the safe is delivered, the next _three_ , Natasha runs clean and sharp as a whistle. 

On the fourth, she kills three policemen in cold blood when she could have slipped into the shadows and let them all live: you put her in the box for the better part of a week. 

...

For that _better part_ , you don't leave the side of the box for more than ten minutes at a time; at night, you lie down on the linoleum and listen for the soft sounds of Natasha breathing and trying not to cry: as long as you don't keep her in the box too long, she says, fear is her greatest enemy. Dehydration comes second. Air is the third. Crying is all three at once and therefore dangerous. To be avoided as long as possible, and when you let her out of the box the first time, she lies face-down, knees curled underneath her, unable to speak or breathe. After a few minutes, the muscles in her limbs and neck begin to twitch. She moans as she manages to slide forward a little and the circulation comes back into her limbs. 

Since you didn't know to sweep the floor, the face she turns up to you is covered with dust. Since this is the first time you put her in the box, you don't know to wait and ask what she wants. Instead, you get down on the floor next to her and help her drink the glass of water in your right hand: slowly, carefully, pulling back when she tries to drink too much at once. It'll turn her stomach inside out: even after she has all the water she wants, her hands don't stop shaking for hours. 

She runs her next dozen missions clean. 

...

Now that you've been running Natasha for close to twenty years, beginning three years after -- 

...

Now that you've been running Natasha for close to twenty years, now that Natasha is the only agent you have run for almost fifteen years, the two of you have a relationship that goes more than a little beyond a handler and agent. Sometimes, she comes by your apartment, and the two of you spend an evening together, barely talking. You sit in your armchair by the window and read the newspaper. Sometimes, you listen to the radio; other times, you put the television on. Natasha always takes the couch, and she usually reads a book that she bought for herself. Russian-language books aren't as easy to come by, but you have a gets French, Italian, German: mostly art and dance criticism, a little philosophy, the occasional English-language piece of nonfiction.

Once, soon after she started visiting in off-hours, you come back into the living room from the bathroom, and she is standing in front of your bookshelf. There is a framed picture there, and she studies it for a moment, then goes back to sitting on the couch and reading. She doesn't ask you who it was; she doesn't try to pretend not knowing who the woman was. 

...

You -- 

...

One night, you start awake. A hand is on your shoulder, and you open your eyes. Natasha is leaning over you; you fell asleep in your armchair. In fact, the book you had been reading is still on your chest, and Natasha hands you back your glasses. You had been holding them in your hand, and when you fell asleep, your hand went limp and they fell to the ground.

You put your glasses back on. Natasha's face swims into focus: the green eyes, the mouth, the curving eyebrows. 

"You were dreaming," she says, and she looks at you. You look at her. Her hand is still on your shoulder. At this point in your life, you aren't surprised that your shoulder is small and fine-boned: it surprises you a little more how small and fine-boned her hand is. You look down at it, then back at the face with the bottomless green eyes over the pink mouth and the red eyebrows. Her face, in its natural state, is vividly colored. You know that she can fade into the woodwork anytime she wants, but this close, off the job, you note the color. The vividness. The quality of her skin, without a single mark or scar or even winkle even though you have been running her for -- 

You hear the thumping of your heart. 

"Do you want to go to bed?" she asks. 

You shake your head, not trusting yourself to speak, and after another moment of studying you, Natasha takes her hand away. She goes back to the couch, picks up her book, and sits down. You lean your head back and take deep, deep breaths, but don't close your eyes. You know better than that, and out of the corner of your eye, you can see the picture on the -- 

Natasha is reading, steady and intent. She doesn't need to ask who you were dreaming about. 

...

In this universe -- 

...

In this universe, as in so many, you love Peggy Carter. In this universe, though, you never get the serum. You never rescue James Buchanan Barnes from HYDRA experimentation. 

In 1953, you accept a posting in London. It is a security risk because she is married, but the two of you pick up where old things left off, and years later, one of the pieces of information that Natasha uses to buy passage is the name of the agent who gouged out Peggy Carter's left eye, then her right eye a week later and send them to MI-6. You remember getting the call as the CIA station officer in London. A week after that, a tape shows on the doorstep of your flat: nobody remembers who left it there. Nobody saw, and it's one big reel with not a lot of tape on it. The boys in audio inform you, state of the art. New stuff. Somebody has a good rig, good as anything the BBC or Bing Crosby has. Put on a player, it fills the room with the sound of Peggy Carter begging to keep her limbs. In 1953, how did you record sound and put it on tape? It took effort. It took planning. 

The cellar abandoned building on the outskirts of London, bombed out and never entirely rebuilt: a half-rotted body in separate pieces. A ration card and identifying papers tucked carefully under a skull, half-covered with dry hair. A smashed-up reel-to-reel recorder.

...

In this universe, Steve Rogers, you never get the serum. You never go thirty-five miles behind enemy lines to mount a single-handed rescue; the Howling Commandos never come into being. Instead, James Buchanan Barnes completes his course under HYDRA experimentation. He stays with HYDRA, and after the fall of Berlin, he could have gone anywhere. He could have done almost anything. Instead, he aligns himself with the Red Room. In the halls of the Kremlin, he is referred to, with respect, as the Soldier. On the training grounds of the Red Room, they call him _Father Winter_ , and after Natasha provides these names and a list of recent missions, a contact in Prague supplies a blurred, black-and-white photo. 

You, Steve Rogers, have played the game since you were twenty-five. You, Steve Rogers, are still largely a good man, but you spend twenty years of your life putting a woman into a box when she kills without permission and taking her back out, all in the name of rewriting her conditioning: this is the time before Charles Xavier and Jean Grey and Emma Frost, so you have to rely on physical methods. You have to trust her, as she trusts you. Consequently, when you see a photograph of your childhood friend, looking exactly as you remember him from an alleyway in Brooklyn, you stare at it for close to five minutes, without speaking, then turn away quickly. The blurred parts in the photographs are the result, you're told, of the picture catching him in the middle of beating a political prisoner to death. 

_Free will_.

...

By the middle of 1954, Peggy Carter is dead, rendered into separate pieces over the course of weeks.

By the spring of 1957, you are sitting across a small round table from Natasha, hoarse with anger about how she doesn't understand the need to run missions clean. There is a window to your left, and through it, you can see the damp, grey Virginia spring. A magnolia tree is getting ready to bloom, and the grass looks as vividly green as Natasha's eyes. 

"You want me to run missions clean?" she says, leaning forward.

Some time later, you ask her: if she defected from the Soviets because they were developing memory-altering technology, why would she tell you about the box?

"You came to their attention after Minsk," she says. "I wrote a profile on you." 

Pale skin. Red eyebrows. Green eyes. Smooth, ageless skin. 

...

Your co-workers at the agency assume that you are in a romantic relationship with Natasha, or that at least, at some point, you've had sex with her. She is beautiful; you are not. She is young; you were once, but unlike her, you age. Natasha gives the impression of being loyal to you, and over the years, it has become clear that you refuse promotions if it means that someone else runs Natasha -- you have an obligation to make sure she is used effectively and sanely. In addition, while you've verbally disclosed the existence of Red Room programming to your superiors and given them an understand the outline of Natasha's exposure, you have not told them what you know about the implementation. Do you trust them with it? 

One night, in Monaco, you are running a joint operation with the SDECE. There are shots below, then the crackle of a walkie-talkie unit and the panicked voice of one of the back-up agents saying that the target has made them and is fleeing on foot -- _the Widow_ was wounded, but in pursuit, and without hesitating, you reach over and take .22 from the dresser. The other handler says to you, in accented English, that backup is on its way. You tell him, in the fluent Parisian gutter French that you learned during the war, that things can't wait for backup. Your agent is in the wind; the target is making for the roof. 

Your French counterpart is fifteen years younger than you, eight inches taller, and at least fifty lean pounds of muscle heavier. He has two good legs, and he is still standing, shocked, as you get the spare walkie talkie and raise Natasha -- she tells you, a little breathless even through the static, that she is in pursuit in the stairwell.

You don't ask how badly she is hurt; instead, you take the Beretta and the walkie-talkie and step into the carpeted hallway. 

...

Natasha looked like a twenty-five year old woman when you met her; twenty years later, she still looks twenty-five. You've gained gray in your hair, a bullet wound from Monaco that hurts when you sleep on your left side. There has always been that bit of shrapnel in your right leg from the war took you out of the field, and now, on top of that: biifocals, asthma that has gotten better with age, but still flares in the spring with pollen: mission after mission, decade after decade: you are loyal to Natasha, as she is loyal to you. Other handlers think of their agents as disposable, replaceable. Natasha has never been that to you. 

The two of you never have sex.

Instead, what lies between you and Natasha looks more like this: one night in Brussels in the winter of 1979, the two of you run _Father Winter_ to ground. 

...

In the winter of 1979, Peggy has been dead a little more than twenty-five years, at least as far as the date of her death could be fixed. You are sixty-one years old. Decades ago, you started on Natasha's trail all those decades ago because you were hunting for the Soviet agent who killed Peggy: you know it wasn't the usual game of cat and mouse and prisoner exchange, and Natasha tells you that it wasn't her. After several years, you agree: it isn't Natasha's kind of thing. 

In Brussels, Natasha makes contact. Half-past ten, you get a call in your hotel room. 

The apartment is actually on the outskirts of the city, in a cement block building. You climb the four flights of stairs; it's a corner unit, no doubt chosen for easy access to the stairs. 

...

In another universe, before submitting her official report, Peggy Carter presses Colonel Phillips to mount a rescue of the men trapped behind enemy lines: he doesn't want to risk any more of his men, which she understands, but what about a small unit infiltration? Steve Rogers was due into camp within the week for a USO tour. Months after the experiment, he still hadn't been given a chance in the field. 

In another universe, Peggy Carter stays in intelligence after the war: without her experience in running the Howling Commandos and the high-level, international connections made doing that, the new, post-war intelligence service turns her out. No need for a job so humiliating that Peggy will resign rather than continue: every door can be closed in her face. They can all tell her no, because Phillips is retired and too old to intercede for her. Without the Howling Commandos and Captain America to design for, Howard Stark left active participation in the Reserve by the end of '44. 

Peggy marries an old childhood friend, and in this universe, the first time you meet her after the war, it's in a comfortable semi-detached with a garden and shed in the back. She tells you that her oldest is going to be boarding at his father's school come September. 

...

After the war, James Buchanan Barnes had the option of going anywhere. He chooses the Soviets because he anticipates that they will have no objections to him slipping past American border control to find a Nazi scientist resettled in Iowa despite his unsuccessful experiments in recreating the serum. They also let him track down a suburban housewife who was previously the analyst that -- 

...

Brussels, 1979. Natasha calls you, and after making sure that _James Buchanan Barnes_ is secured to the chair, she waits on the balcony and smokes a cigarette. 

...

Peggy Carter died a long time before, but your days of running around Brooklyn with Bucky Barnes are even further back. Further, the man strapped to the chair in the kitchen doesn't look much like your childhood friend would be expected to. Partially, it's because the life he has led. Partially, too, it's because the serum that Zola gave him has slowed his aging, but not arrested it entirely like it did with Natasha. 

He doesn't have any excuses: he never goes off the side of a train. He has memories, and they have made him brutal. 

For one night, in Brussels, in 1979, you let yours do the same. 

...

At the end, Natasha comes in and gives you a gun. The two of you discussed it beforehand; she had every faith in your ability to beat the shit out of _Father Winter_ if she worked him over first, but she also pointed out that if you carried a gun, he might be able to take it from you and try to hold you hostage in getting away: so you turned your gun over to her. She had also cleared all the knives and all the dangerous things out of the kitchen. The old couple that owned the apartment were dead, taken out weeks ago when _Father Winter_ decided to use their home for an emergency bolthole, so nobody would miss the steak knives. 

Eventually, you knock on the glass sliding door between the kitchen and the balcony, and Natasha turns around slowly. You gesture for her to come in, so she grinds out her cigarette; you slide the door open, and she steps inside. 

Natasha holds James Buchanan Barnes down on the table; you put two into the back of his brain. 

...

What is there to say besides that? He was a childhood friend. You don't understand every turn of fate that led you to the apartment in Brussels, but with diligent intelligence work, you have reconstructed enough of them. You hunt Soviet agents as a job; you are, despite your body, very, very good at your job. 

...

What is there to say beyond that? 

James Barnes had memories; they made him brutal, and for one night, in Brussels, in 1979, you let yours do the same. You have given your life in service for your country and its allies; you have done what you can to protect Natasha. There is information in his head that could save lives and change the course of world events, but. 

One night. 

...

Here is what else can be said: years later, you retire, and Natasha comes to visit you regularly. The first home you've ever owned, rather than rented, and it turns out to be a one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility. The room is bright and sunny and comfortable; it looks onto the interior courtyard, and it's a reasonably pleasant way for a man without family to spend his last years. When you are too old for assisted living, you'll move into the medical wing of the facility, and after that, into the hospice. 

In the meantime, Natasha comes to see you regularly -- usually at least every other month, but sometimes more. Sometimes less. The staff assume she is a remarkably dutiful, remarkably beautiful grand-daughter. Natasha says that when they ask, she tells them that the two of you have known each other for a very long time: the middle-aged immigrant women who do most of the work around the nursing home look at the girl who drives a black Ford Mustang to the parking lot and have opinions on what she can mean by a _long time_. 

These days, Natasha has given up the broad hats and trench coat. She tends to wear a little leather jacket and tight jeans. Boots. Her hair is short, chin-length and curlier than you ever remember her wearing it when you were running her. 

"Coulson treating you right?" 

"He's fine," Natasha says. "We were back in Marseille a few weeks ago." 

You smile, and she smiles back at you. Both of you remember Marseille. 

...

Natasha hasn't been in the box for decades: you don't know if she has told her new handler how to use it. You have no idea whether the old set-up still exists, and she sits with you for a long time. Do they need it in the day of Charles Xavier and Jean Gray and Emma Frost? Maybe, maybe not. You have a suspicion that Natasha might not like someone reaching into her head and fiddling directly with her memories. 

Sunlight comes through the window, and you close your eyes: after all, you were born in 1918. You are coming onto ninety years on this Earth, and you were not well in your childhood. Eventually, in the peace and comfort, with Natasha's cool hand covering yours, you fall asleep. When Natasha wants to move quietly, she can move exceedingly quietly: she takes her hand away, and she gets the blanket with the couch and puts a blanket around your knees. Then, she closes the door, quietly, behind her. She reminds the nurse at the end of the hallway to check in with you for dinner, so that you don't oversleep. 

She promises to, and Natasha goes. Everyone who would be surprised that Natasha Romanoff, pride of the Red Room, cream of Project X and the elite of the KGB, would -- 

...

In your dreams, you are sometimes back to Europe. An operation in a cold, remote fishing village on the coast of Norway, the breathless run across the length of Portugal, the time that the two of you spent three months smuggling high-level Nazi defectors on the overland route through the Alps: things that are difficult to call up in conscious memory become they happened in another century. The smell of cordite, navigating by the stars in the north Sahara. 

...

Peggy died so long ago. After Brussels, you got rid of your photographs of her. Let her be remembered as a devoted wife and mother to two children who vanished on her way back from an uncharacteristic trip into the city. Almost sixty years ago at this point: an unsolved crime. Even her children are old by now. 

...

Your dreams are vivid and largely accurate, Steve Rogers, but nevertheless, at the end of your life that will not be extended by the serum, what are you? A collection of pieces and parts. In your dreams, there is the smog-filtered light of Brooklyn in your childhood coming down into the mud of France in December 1944. Peggy's brown hair and voice and her hands across an oilskin code sheet as you bent over the radio transmission set, but when she turns to look at you, she has two eyes, and both of them are green. Her skin is smooth, ageless. Deathless. She blinks, and you are opening the balcony door to let her inside. Your childhood friend turned international assassin lies cuffed to a chair, his handsome, middle-aged face coated with blood between forehead and mouth, his mouth trying to make noises at you. 

Natasha holds his shoulders down on the kitchen table, and the Beretta has a slide safety. 

After you pull it, you're sitting in your Washington apartment in an armchair. A light stand is on your right, and Peggy has been reading across from you all night; the Beretta is still in your hands, but she stands up and puts a small hand on your shoulder. 

...

In this universe, Steve Rogers, you never get the serum. 

Instead of being frozen into ice and coming to the year 2008 young and strong and angry and alienated, you die in peace in a hospice in a suburb of Washington. Natasha settles your glasses underneath your hands and closes your eyes, then goes to call the nurse and say that her friend has stopped breathing: in this universe, instead of fighting next to you in the streets of New York while aliens come through a portal, Natasha kisses your dry cheek and tells you goodbye in the gutter wartime Paris slang, fifty years old, that you taught her. She sat by your bedside, holding your hand while you died, came as often as her schedule permitted. 

Does Natasha still frighten people who know what to look for? Does she still look twenty-five? 

...

In this universe, Steve Rogers, you do good where you can, where lesser men would not, but one night in Brussels, you do something that is arguably evil and undeniably selfish. You spend almost thirty years running the Black Widow, teaching her to care, teaching her to _run clean_ and replacing Red Room programming with something that sits better with your personal moral code. On the other hand, she gives you permission. Does that make it better?

In the end, what does any of it amount to? Parts. Pieces. Green eyes. Pale, ageless skin and kindness in the afternoon to a dying man. It isn't a lot, in the personal scheme of things, but it is all you have: in this universe, Steve Rogers, the two of you never slept together. 

In this universe, Steve Rogers, you spent more nights sleeping next to Natasha in a metal box, than you ever did next to Peggy in bed. 

Parts. Pieces. Green eyes: in Queens, in 1943, a _chance_.

**Author's Note:**

> Any ideas that make you lie down and go OH SHIT came from [destronomics.](http://destronomics.tumblr.com/) And thanks to the kind anon who said COME ON LADY FINISH THIS on tumblr. :D


End file.
